I said last time that I have probably developed enough alternate Earths. Standing by that, this year’s Super Sunday theme will be Superior Species Sunday (though I’ll probably just actually call is Alien Sundays, because that’s better). Screw Earth. Let’s see what else my universes have got. Every week I will be fleshing out an alien species. Let us begin:

The Ugder

The species known as the Ugder come from a planet also called Ugder. They are a blue-skinned humanoid people with big heads, conical ears, thick black manes, and three fingered hands. Theirs is a cold and wintry world and, while they live there happily, they got off that world pretty quickly. When the Ugder first achieved space flight technology, there was still a continent on their own world which had not been discovered. For nearly two thousand years now, the Ugder have visited and colonized dozens of planets in the systems closest to their home, and met several species of aliens in the process. In most cases, the Ugder are the first alien species those other aliens have ever met, and these meetings are not always beneficial to both parties (the Ugder were especially cruel to the first aliens they met, the Shlafes). In recent years, however, the Ugder have begun to create more peaceful alliances with the aliens they meet, going so far as to try to organize a system of Space Government with representatives from various worlds.

Some representatives of the Ugder people:

Digmimm is a member of the Ugder Shipping Security Force. The Force trains pilots who fly fighter ships that escort Ugder Shipping Convoys through space to protect them from attack by criminals. Digmimm, however, encountered not criminals on her first mission, but first contact with a hostile alien force. She not only survived, but succeeded in driving off the attack with most of the convoy intact. This made her a hero to the Security Force and to the Udger at large, but what she doesn’t is that she has become infamous among that alien species, with her face being used in hateful propaganda as that group prepares for a war against the Ugder.

The planet Yimmin is home to a colony of anarchists that consider themselves apart from the rest of Ugder society. Yimmin the individual was named after this world by his parents, who were among the early colonizers of that world. Yimmin left the planet he was named after as soon as he could find a means to do so. But being from, and named for, a world that the rest of Ugder society considers a home to criminals, Yimmin had trouble finding a place. Ironically, it was this that caused Yimmin to have to turn to a life of crime. Yimmin is now making a living smuggling contraband between worlds.

Raised on an Ugder transport ship by his businessman father, Mimitimim found his own life when he became a writer of fiction. His first story, a coming of age tale about a young Ugder who was tortured by his schoolmates, was extremely popular and the young author settled down on planet Ugder becoming something of a celebrity. Settling into a life of parties and wallowing in fame, it took years for him to produce a new story. That second novel, about a farmer who lost his family and his mind during the during a space war, was also widely praised. He became the most celebrated author of his generation. He lived in a large home shared with a literal harem (as scandalous in Ugder culture as it would be in ours). Eventually his third story was finished and released. It was deemed unreadable by critics. Tasting failure and humiliation for the first time, Mimitimim did not react well. He covertly snuck off-world and now dwells on the seventh moon of an obscure world, in isolation.

A Fact About the Ugder: Though I said I was fleshing out the universes in which my alternate Earths take place, I am actually not doing that this week. The Ugder live in a universe unrelated to all those I spoke about last week. This is an alternate timeline that differs from so far back that when the stars and galaxies formed differently, so that the galaxies we know such as the Milky Way were never formed and wholly different ones did. This universe has no Earth or humans at all. If that isn’t a blow to anthropocentricism, I don’t know what is. We’ll call this universe “Narsidon” as it should not be a human word.

The Dark Lord Char’Nagh rides anew, sending lightning bolts flying and creating vast, coastline-shattering waves. Will we be able to stand this? Only time will tell.

Okay, another new year. This is definitely the year that Secret Government Robots will be ending. I’ve been slacking for the last few weeks, and this story has already grown two chapters larger than it was when I first plotted it out, but I should soon be back on track and we’ll get through it at last. One thing that will help, is that I’ve done some damage (thanks to effin’ snow) to the car I drive for work. This is going to set back my climbing out of debt by several months, but one the “bright side” I am unemployed while it is being repaired. If nothing else, that’ll give me time to work on stuff…

Bees are disappearing and something needs to be done about that. “1313: Giant Killer Bees!” is a “movie” that uses that as the setup for its “plot”. In an attempt to give bees the boost they need to survive, some professor has shipped a bunch of handsome students to a tropical compound to try to fix bees with experiments. Paul is the only beekeeper in the project, everyone else being a mere scientist.

Well, the experiments result in giant bees that turn people into zombies and Paul dies almost immediately. They can’t all be winners. But hey, the movie says that he’s basically one of the only competent people involved in the project. He had nothing to do with the injections that caused the mutations. The fact that he removes his protective mask while running away from a giant bee could be a sign of stupidity, but maybe he can just gauge how useless it would be against a giant bee, right? Could be. Wants to free up his peripheral vision? Maybe?

Anyway… The giant bees cause the end of the world.

Two Honeycombs out of Five. He seemed to be a functional beekeeper, but in the face of the supernatural, he could not hold his own.

Charlotte “Chuck” Charles appeared in the show “Pushing Daisies”. Unfortunately, she was killed off in the very first episode. Fortunately, this was a show where that doesn’t stop her, for the protagonist, a piemaker named Ned, has the ability to raise the dead with his touch. There are rules about how this works, but those are his deal and this is about Chuck, so let’s focus on her.

The facts are these: When Chuck was young, her father died. Afterward, she was raised by her aunts, who introduced her to beekeeping. After growing up and being murdered, she was resurrected by Ned. Now ‘Alive-Again’ (a term she prefers over undead), Chuck resumes her beekeeping career on a roof in the city (“Operation: Urban Honey Pioneer”).

Does she have any powers? Well, she probably won’t age, that counts for something. If I really want to push it, I can say that she has used mood-enhancing drugs while baking pies, which is sort of like being knowledgeable with potions and stuff. She keeps her cool even when being swarmed by bees that aren’t her own, which is good and actually beekeeping-related. More significantly, when her bees are killed by “rogue pesticides” she has Ned reanimate them all, creating a hive full of ageless Alive-Again bees. That’s pretty neat. Finally, she has claimed that the honey that she and the bees make now is the best she’s had, though she admits that most things taste better since her death, so we can’t be too sure. There is no legacy of beekeeping in her family, though. It seems that her aunts simply found an ad for some bees in a magazine and thought it might cheer her up. The aunts seem to have helped out when she was a kid, but this is not one of those cases where a beekeeper comes from a lineage of those in the profession.

Well, what kind of person is she? It is implied that she has some sins in her past that she wants to make up for after her rebirth, but I don’t see the signs of Beekeeper Rage. In her post-death life, she joins Ned and his friends as they solve mysteries. I’ve not covered this before, but I definitely put solving mysteries in the same category as being a badass fighter. Solving mysteries is just fighting crime with your brain’s fists, after all. By the end of the series, she is even adopting a “superhero”-style nickname for herself: “The Alive-Again Avenger”. Sounds like she’s in this for keeps. Alright, so how does she stack up?

Three Honeycombs out of Five. She’s an impressive beekeeper with some supernatural elements, I’ll give her that. But, apart from one episode that made mention of the fact that Egyptians connected bees with death, the supernatural elements have little to do with her being a beekeeper. She’s a reanimated crimefighter who happens to keep bees.